Almost everything the government has done to rescue our faltering economy has been kicking it while it is down. From the bailouts to the stimulus packages to cap and trade and universal health care bills, it is a miracle the economy is functioning at all. It is crazy to criticize saving the economy, the environment, and improving the standard of living for Americans so that is not what I’m doing. I want the economy to come back, the environment to be clean, and the standard of living to be high.

The disconnect is that while the government says they want to do all those good things, they will end up accomplishing the opposite.

I’ve talked plenty about how the government’s attempts at rescuing the economy is the equivalent of giving a drug addict more drugs, how man-made climate change is a load of crap, and how the problem with healthcare is the excessive amount of government involvement. So, I won’t beat a dead horse. I will instead tackle another unpopular topic: the minimum wage.

If it was up to me, the minimum wage would be $0. The minimum wage is promoted as a means to create wealth equality and provide all Americans with a livable income but, the reality is nothing that is promoted. A minimum wage keeps more workers out of work.

The government is essentially saying that if you do not have the skills to warrant whatever the minimum wage is, you should not work. Sound backwards? It’s not. There is no reason for a company to hire you for $7.25 to do a job that is worth much less. So where there was a chance for people without skills to take a lower wage to learn the skills so that they can get ahead in life, the government takes it away.

If you made some wrong decisions or life just threw you a bad hand, you no longer have the means to work your way up. The government eliminated the steps at the bottom of the ladder and if you can’t jump high enough to reach the new bottom, you are screwed. To fix this unemployment problem, the government puts a band-aid over it by offering welfare for the people the government put out of work! How grand.

To compound the problem, the government via the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply to fund all their welfare/warfare projects and our cost of living goes up. To solve this problem, the government raises the minimum wage because it is now more expensive to live. The increased minimum wage puts more workers out of work and the government needs to offer more welfare by printing, borrowing, or taxing and the cost of living goes up more! This is the vicious cycle created by government and further made worse by more government intervention.

No one in Congress is going to vote no to the increase in the minimum wage because it is politically unpopular–except Ron Paul and a few others who understand economics and unintended consequences.

No one wants to see the actual picture of what the minimum wage does. When people criticize the minimum wage and call for its abolition–like myself–we are labeled as monsters who do not care about the poor. I am not multi-millionaire and I don’t make that much money. I just understand economics. I don’t care about the poor as much as I care about myself–I won’t lie about it.

I find little wrong with putting yourself, family, and friends first before random strangers. It is terrible that people are living in poverty but I am not so far away that the policies I support will benefit me at the expense of the poor. It will benefit everyone.

It is an economic lie that the minimum wage is good for the economy. If the minimum wage can solve our poverty problems, why not just make it $100/hr and everyone would be rich! Obviously, we can see that it would be disastrous and practically everyone will be out of a job or prices will be sky high for everything.

So as usual, the government is kicking the economy while it is down with this minimum wage increase.

By Tommy Leung

Tags: Economic, Federal Reserve System, Labor, min wage, Minimum wage, Money supply, ron paul, Unemployment

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